Increases their sense of being part of a community (a significant barrier for online success).
Improves the sense that the teachers are present in their learning experience.
Students enjoy having options for commenting (text, audio, phone-audio, video).
VoiceThread improves student-student and student-teacher communication and reduces the amount of "hurt feelings", as opposed to the usual bulletin-board format, because the human voice eliminates misinterpretations of text-based comments.
Download Irfanview to change image sizes before loading photographs onto your wikipage. If you don't they will take FOREVER to load.
Remember that not everyone uses a PC. To make sure MAC users can see your photostories and movies, use Zamzar to change your files to Quicktime format. Zamzar is a free service. You send your file to them and tell them to send it back to you in a MOV or MPG format.
Resources
Digital Story Telling
Slow Mation A site with great slow motion video examples and free SAM software.
Voicethread
Benefits to online students
Download Irfanview to change image sizes before loading photographs onto your wikipage. If you don't they will take FOREVER to load.
http://www.irfanview.com/
Remember that not everyone uses a PC. To make sure MAC users can see your photostories and movies, use Zamzar to change your files to Quicktime format. Zamzar is a free service. You send your file to them and tell them to send it back to you in a MOV or MPG format.
http://www.zamzar.com/
You can make all sorts of graphs really easily using this site.
http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/default.aspx
To make sure MAC users can hear your voiceovers and music, you can use Audactiy to record them and make them into mp3s
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
How to use Audacity from Rob Sbaglia on Vimeo.
Use Wordle to make some mood poems of any parts of your space journey. (wordle example)
http://www.wordle.net/create
Mind Miester, Webspiration and Buzzword You can collaborate with other students using these tools. Webspiration has a chat function.
How to use this wikispace - teacher info
This site will give you lots of information on how to use various web 2 tools
https://cap-chatter.wikispaces.com/
Make your wiki look cool!
http://gettingtrickywithwikis.wikispaces.com/
Make your own graffiti for your group page.
http://graffiticreator.net/
Use animated alphabets to give your group name a wow factor.
http://www.heathersanimations.com/alphabetlist22.html
Use Photopeach to make slide shows of your children's work or activities.
Use Oddcast to make a talking avatar for your page.
Or try Vokis to create talking avatars for your page.
All sorts of useful stuff
http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/